I just found another citywide PA recording from Urasoe. I think it was marking the noon or 1 o’clock hour. You’ll get an idea of how serene the city could feel from our tatami mat apartment bedrooms, until the traffic light turned green (“blue”) on the major highway right below.

Tomorrow begins the third leg of our trip: The Unknown. With no specifics in mind, we’ll be around Naha and Okinawa City and maybe a couple other little towns for all of April, trying to meet musicians and other people of interest.

Then in May we’ll hopefully go to Tokyo to hang out with Sigrunn, who may as well be our cousin now too. And on May 10, just as our visitors’ visas expire, we shall return home, triumphant and broke.

The most famous sanshin player here who’s not Okinawan is Byron Jones. He has established himself as an expert of Okinawan culture and language, even though born American, and now he teaches sanshin to native Okinawans.

Byron is a friend of Mike, our program director, and old friend of our moms, so he let me sit in on this week’s lesson at the Urasoe community center.

Most of the hour-and-a-half practice was spent eating a Hotto Motto platter and congratulating one of the students, who just completed a master’s degree in Ryukyuan studies at age 75.

But I did learn about this notation: Music is read from right to left in vertical columns. The right side of the column is for the voice, which also includes symbols denoting inflection and intonation, and the left side is for the sanshin notes, written in kanji characters.

Byron also explained the two main schools of classical sanshin music. The original is named for its creator, Afuso, the elder students. This method is said to be the “more pure.” One of Afuso’s students, Nomura, was chosen by the king to develop a new style of music, Amuro, which I think is more widely practiced today. (If I got any of this wrong, feel free to correct.)

He gave me some homework to memorize the note positions, since sanshin has no frets. Hopefully I will have more information as weekly lessons continue!

Last week our school had an assembly to honor the sixth graders, who graduate next week (the Japanese school year starts in April and ends in March). Each grade did a different dance or presentation for their onissan and oneesan — older brothers and sisters. It was super cute.